


the rest can wait

by waveydnp



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 04:59:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14301321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waveydnp/pseuds/waveydnp
Summary: dan's year at manchester university





	the rest can wait

**Author's Note:**

> written for the phamdom fic fest theme of spring/new beginnings 
> 
> thanks to zan, mandy and ashley as always for being the best betas and the best friends <3 couldn't have made this fic even half as good as it is without you

“God this sucks. Moving house sucks. I’ve changed my mind, I’ll just stay here forever. Rawtenstall’s not so bad — plus this way I don’t even have to pay rent.”

“Phil you tight bastard.” Dan gives him a reproachful look from across the room, across the obstacle course of boxes half full of Phil’s things. “You already signed the lease.”

He doesn’t like hearing Phil say things like that, even in jest. It feels like Dan’s been waiting for this for ages, for a space where they can be who they are, what they are to each other, without the eyes or ears of anyone else on them. It won’t be his place really, it’ll be Phil’s, but still. A step in the right direction. 

One more month, Dan tells himself. One more month and they’ll be living in the same city. A city where their parents aren’t. A city they can start their lives in properly. The city where they first met, where they threw their arms around each other on that train platform. The city where they first kissed.

Their city. That’s how Dan thinks of it already. Manchester is their city, and in one month they’ll both be living in it, and he’s never looked forward to anything more in his entire life.

*

It’s a small flat, but it’s nice enough. It has a kitchen and a bathroom and a lounge and even a balcony. Everything one needs in a place of residence. It only has one bedroom, in which Phil and his dad have set up one bed frame to hold one mattress. 

It’s the perfect number. Dan fits into that bed just right. Just as if he belongs there, tucked up in between Phil’s long body and the plain white wall. 

Nothing is put away, nothing set up. There are boxes scattered everywhere, an empty fridge, a small dining table littered with ravaged takeaway containers. There isn’t even any internet yet. 

But there is Phil and there is Dan, and no one else. It reminds him of Blackpool, and of Portugal, and of Jamaica, of nights spent together in privacy they didn’t have to steal. 

“Hey Dan.” Phil’s voice is little more than a whisper in the darkness of his new bedroom, the deep rumble of it comforting where Dan’s cheek is pressed against Phil’s bare chest. 

“What?”

“I live in Manchester now.”

Dan smiles to himself. “I know.”

“We’re really doing it,” Phil murmurs. “It’s really happening.”

It is. They are. They’ve been planning it nearly since the beginning, since Dan had to choose what universities to apply to. The day he got his unconditional acceptance was the day they started talking about finding Phil a flat in the city. 

And now here they are, naked and tangled up in each other in Phil’s bed in Phil’s flat in Manchester. 

Dan has to leave in a few days, back home to Wokingham. He hates it. He always hates leaving Phil behind, or watching Phil leave him behind. But soon he’ll be back. Wokingham won’t be home for much longer. 

He’s still not sure how he feels about school. In all honesty it scares him quite a bit. He’s already half sure he’s not cut out to be a lawyer, but for now he finds it easier not to think about that part too much. It’s much easier to focus on the elation he feels thinking about living so close to Phil.

He tilts his head up to kiss Phil, but starts coughing before he can make it to Phil’s lips.

Phil laughs. “Thanks, mate.”

Dan shivers, suddenly feeling rather crap. Phil just thinks he’s cold, and wraps his arms tighter around Dan’s back. 

*

“It looks like a fucking gulag.”

Dan’s sitting on his bed, looking around his new room in horror. His parents have gone, but Phil’s still here, sat at the desk and looking at Dan sympathetically. Their knees are pushed together, that’s how little space there is in this yellow-walled prison cell. It smells a bit like cigarettes, but at least it’s dark out now and he can’t see the truly depressing view of the giant dumpster outside his window.

“It’s… it’s not great,” Phil agrees. “But it’s yours.”

Dan chews on his lip, stomach twisted up anxiously. Maybe this was all a giant bloody mistake. 

“Why am I doing this again?” he mutters. “Why am I even here?”

Phil sits down next to Dan and puts his arm around Dan’s shoulder. “It’s going to be fine. You’re going to meet loads of people and make loads of friends. Uni is fun, I promise.” 

It doesn’t make him feel better. He’s not in the same boat as Phil was, not even close. Phil had chosen to study something he was actually interested in. In fact, he’d actually stayed in school a whole extra year, just because he liked it so much. Dan picked law because he thought it made him sound smart. Or maybe just because he wanted to impress his parents.

Maybe he should’ve taken the intensity with which he’d hated his work experience at that law firm back home as proof that this was all a terrible idea. But he’d ignored it. He’d convinced himself things would work themselves out. He had to go to uni. That’s just… what you do. 

“Why am I here, Phil?” The reality of the situation is hitting him now with full force. He definitely can’t ignore it anymore. 

“You want the proper uni experience,” Phil reminds him gently. 

“Right.” That is what he’s been saying. It’s what he’s been telling himself, and what he’s been telling Phil.

He’s not sure how true it is. He knows he’s supposed to want the proper uni experience. He knows it’s what his family expects of him. He knows it’s just generally the accepted thing to do if you want to be successful in life. 

He wants to be successful. He’s just not sure that a law degree is how he wants to do it. 

“I’m scared,” he says quietly, because he can say those things to Phil. 

“I was too when I first moved to York. I was terrified. But they turned out to be some of the best years of my life.”

Dan nods. He hopes Phil’s right. 

“You know you don’t have to sleep here tonight. You can come back to mine.”

It’s bloody tempting, it is. But Phil’s also right about Dan wanting the proper experience. In a way, anyway. He at least wants to be able to say he tried.

So he shakes his head. “You’ll stay though, right?” 

Phil cocks an eyebrow. “Is that allowed?”

Dan smirks, shrugging Phil’s arm off his shoulders and pushing him down onto the bed. He climbs up and sits right on Phil’s hips. “Don’t care.”

They have sex and Phil has to keep his hand clamped over Dan’s mouth the whole time. Dan clings to Phil as they fall asleep and helps Phil sneak out early the next morning. His chest is tight as he returns to his room alone, but he knows he has to do this. 

Phil texts him later and tells him to leave his door open, to mingle and introduce himself to people and make friends. He also tells Dan he loves him.

Dan draws the curtains and plays Halo in his room for two days without coming out for anything other than the toilet and the occasional bag of vending machine crisps. 

*

He can’t go another day without clean underwear. For some godforsaken reason he hadn’t thought to bring more than five pairs of pants for living in a new bloody city, and now he’s paying for it. 

He clutches his basket of dirty laundry as he stands in the queue. It feels like he’s been here forever and there are still three people ahead of him. His shoulders are starting to tense with the anxiety of it all, the cloying scent of detergent and bleach burning in his sinuses. His head is pounding, a dull ache settling itself behind his eyes. The fluorescent lights are too bright and the noises are too loud. 

He’s been stood here long enough to get a vague sense of some sort of hierarchy, a system of rules and etiquette that he hadn’t been prepared for. He can tell it exists but he has no idea how he fits into it, and it twists his stomach up in nervous knots the closer he gets to the front of the queue. He keeps glancing around, hoping desperately that he’ll lock eyes with someone who looks as lost and afraid as he feels. Maybe even someone kind, someone who can explain to him how this all works. 

Instead what he sees is someone wrenching open the door of one of the already running machines and dumping the dripping wet clothes contained within onto the dirty ground before shoving his own laundry in, to be washed by water and detergent and time that was paid for by someone else. 

Twenty minutes later Dan’s laundry is jammed into his suitcase and the taxi is halfway to Phil’s flat.

The first words out of Phil’s mouth when he opens the door are, “Are you moving in?” Like he’d been expecting it all along.

“What? No.” He waits for Phil to step back and let him inside. “I just… I need to use your washing machine, ok?”

“You came halfway across the city to do laundry? Don’t they have machines there?” 

Dan drops his suitcase and flops down onto the sofa. “I saw a bloke steal someone else’s sock, Phil. Like, he just picked up a wet sock off the floor and walked away with it.”

Phil steps over Dan’s outstretched legs and sits next to him. “Yeah?”

“Like what if I put my shit in the machine and I come back and half of it’s just gone? And it turns out some perv is just hid in his room wanking into it or something?”

Phil’s lip twitches. He’s clearly making an effort not to laugh in Dan’s face, though he looks like he won’t be able to hold out for long. “You wouldn’t know that though, I reckon. That they’re… doing that.”

“Yeah but I already only have five pairs of pants as it is.” Dan’s voice is humourless. “I can’t afford to lose any of them.”

“Ok.” Phil puts his arm around Dan’s shoulder, pulls him in until his head is on Phil’s chest. 

It’s just what Dan had been wanting, honestly. Phil always seems to know just what Dan needs, and just the right way to go about giving it to him. 

Dan coughs. Like he’s been doing for over a month now. He’s almost gotten used to just feeling poorly all the time.

“Are you still ill?” Phil asks.

Dan just coughs harder in response, feeling utterly helpless and pathetic. 

Phil squeezes him tighter. “You know you can do your laundry here whenever you want. You can do anything here whenever you want. I’m always just missing you when you’re not here anyway.”

Dan nods. He’d thought this had actually been about laundry, but maybe it’s more than that. Maybe the laundry had just been an excuse to come visit his boyfriend. “Me too,” he murmurs. “I kind of hate it there, Phil.”

Phil brushes Dan’s fringe across his forehead, out of his eyes. It’s getting too long, even for him. It’s also definitely not very clean, and Dan suddenly feels acutely aware of how lax he’s been on hygiene this week. There’s only one bathroom for his whole hall and the showers are kind of gross and soap-scummy and everything mostly just feels too hard. 

“You just need time to adjust,” Phil says, fingers winding their way into that unwashed hair. “It’s always crap in the beginning.”

“I cried in the cheese aisle.”

“What? When?”

“The other day. I went to Asda with my housemates and I was trying to think of anything I knew how to cook and I couldn’t think of anything and it just hit me that like, I’m alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Phil insists. “Not ever.”

“I am though. I even called my nan because I forgot about her sudoku club, like how fucking sad is that?”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

Dan pulls his knees up to his chest and hugs them, essentially forming himself into a ball and leaning all his weight into Phil’s side. “I dunno. Trying to have the proper uni experience and all that shit,” Dan mutters. “Can’t exactly ask you to just solve all my problems whenever I’m useless, can I?”

“There’s a difference between being useless and asking for help, Dan. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help.”

Dan nods. Probably that’s true in theory. It’s just not something he does. He doesn’t ask for help. For better or for worse he’s the suffer in silence type. The bottle it all up until it starts to eat you alive type. 

“Will you call me next time?” Phil asks.

“Maybe.”

“Will you stay here tonight?”

Dan tilts his head back to look into Phil’s eyes. Deep blue eyes obscured by a long fringe of his own. “Can I?”

“Always.” Phil puts his hand on Dan’s cheek and kisses him because it’s just what Dan needs right now. 

They make out gently for a long while, because even though Dan’s a little sad and a little scared, it’s still so new and exciting that they can do this. Dan can spend the night and sleep in Phil’s bed and they don’t have to hide it or keep quiet. 

They move to Phil’s room where he films a video for his channel. Dan sits on the end of the bed and watches him, still so taken with the way he plays himself up for the camera. It’s so seamless, so effortless the way he becomes that other version of himself — the version that first caught Dan’s eye. 

It’s not the version of Phil that Dan fell in love with, but it still gives him butterflies because it reminds him of the beginning, of watching Phil’s videos the moment they were posted, of the first time Phil replied to him on twitter, of the first time he saw AmazingPhil’s face on the other end of his skype call. In a strange way it reminds him that he’s the one lucky enough to see both versions of Phil.

Phil pulls Dan into the video and it gives him a surge of pride when Phil says, “Also, guess who just moved to Manchester?” He should probably be used to it at this point, but sometimes it still makes him giddy, the casual way Phil includes him in his videos now, the way he just assumes his audience knows who Dan is.

Dan coughs some more and says “rawr,” before Phil introduces ‘draw Phil naked pokémon edition.’

Dan takes a shower and Phil does his laundry. They order pizza and stay up late playing mario kart. When he leaves in the morning, it’s not because he has to get on a train and go back to his real life, it’s just because he has to go to class.

*

Dan goes in and out of feeling ill for the next month. It’s not until he can’t get out of bed for three days and his fever hits 103 that Phil finally forces him to go the doctor’s.

“It’s just a bit of tummy rumbling,” Dan insists at the same time as he’s shivering beneath Phil’s duvet. It’s been nearly a week since he spent the night in halls.

“Shut up. Put your coat on.” Phil’s not having it. He calls a taxi and holds Dan’s hand in the back seat on the way to the clinic. 

He’s sat in the waiting room, thumbing through a magazine and looking worried when Dan finally comes back out. 

“He said I have an infection.” Dan’s voice is small. He really doesn’t feel good at all. 

They fill the prescription and go back to Phil’s. Dan loses count of how many classes he misses. 

*

“We’re going to A&E. Now. Get up, Dan.” Phil puts down his phone. Dan doesn’t know who he’d been talking to, but he assumes it was the NHS, as his face is lined with a worry more pressing than it had been twenty minutes ago.

Dan shakes his head. He’d taken the goddamn motherfucking pills every day like he was supposed to, every day for a whole bloody week, even though one of the possible side effects listed on the packet was death. Literally just… death. 

And helpfully, they’d done absolutely nothing whatsoever. 

So now he’s lying in Phil’s bed, sweating and shivering, clutching his stomach against the incessant rolling nausea and gritting his teeth against the pain. Just so much pain.

Phil doesn’t ask again. He grabs Dan by the shoulders and yanks him out of bed. He’s stronger than he looks. He throws a pair of jeans at Dan and tells him to put them on. 

The waiting room at The Manchester Royal Infirmary is terrifying. Everyone is either drunk or high or bleeding or homeless-looking, or some combination thereof. It smells like piss and sick and antiseptic and does nothing to help the queasiness Dan’s just barely managing to keep under control. The nurse at triage gives him about four different pills to swallow, which he manages to do with great difficulty after repeated attempts. If he wasn’t feeling so god awful he knows Phil would make some kind of crude joke.

They’re told to wait, which they do, as far from everyone else as they can get. They hide in the corner, Dan curling his legs up into his chest and hoping their matching haircuts and skinny jeans don’t stick out as much as he thinks they do. 

They wait for hours. Dan falls asleep on Phil’s shoulder for a little while. It’s the middle of the night after all, and he hasn’t eaten or slept properly in days. 

When he wakes up he actually feels a little better. Maybe choking down those pills had been worth it. Phil pulls out a half-eaten bag of snow bites from the pocket of his coat and they play Peggle until Dan finally gets called into an exam room, where a nurse puts an IV in the back of his hand.

They wait some more until a doctor comes into the room and Phil is asked to leave. Dan wants to say it’s ok, Phil can stay, he wants Phil to stay, but neither of them really know how to do that. The doctor says it’s a personal type of exam he has to do and Dan wants to say it doesn’t matter — but he just doesn’t know how. They haven’t figured out how to have conversations like that yet, or even if they really want to. So Dan watches sadly as Phil shuts the door on his way out.

It’s painful and embarrassing and he’s near tears by the time the doctor tells him he’ll have to spend the night and go for surgery the next day. Dan asks if Phil can come up with him and the doctor says no, visiting hours are over and only family members are allowed at this time. 

Dan wants to say Phil is his family, but he knows how to say that even less than anything else.

“I’ll come back first thing in the morning,” Phil promises. “K?”

Dan nods, biting his lip, his chin quivering dangerously. In a few minutes he’ll be all alone. He wants to hold Phil’s hand. He wants to kiss him. He wants to fall asleep in his arms. 

“I love you,” Phil whispers, so the nurse doesn’t hear. “And don’t worry. You’ll be back home in no time.”

Dan’s heart breaks a little further, because he doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t even know where home is anymore. He gives Phil a weak smile. He can’t tell Phil he loves him, because the nurse is right beside him now, asking if he’s ready to go upstairs to his room.

He feels small and lost and broken as he watches Phil walk away. He’s holding his clothes in one hand and the cold metal of the IV pole in the other. He can feel air on his back where his gown is open to it. He’s not even wearing pants. 

He doesn’t even have the room to himself. The man on the other end of the curtain is obviously in pain and Dan has enough empathy to feel bad, but the guy keeps muttering “ow” with every breath, every two seconds without fail and it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to become excruciating to listen to. 

Dan’s phone doesn’t get any reception, which means he can’t even tell Phil he loves him over text. His body aches and he cries into his pillow, listening to the saline dripping and his heart rate monitor beeping and that poor sod next to him whinging until he finally falls asleep.

Phil is there when he wakes up, and he stays right next to Dan until it’s time for his surgery. He squeezes Dan’s hand before his gurney is rolled away and neither of them give a single flying fuck who sees. 

Phil is waiting in Dan’s room when he gets back from surgery, and he pulls out a greasy paper bag of McDonald’s as soon as the nurse is gone. Dan could cry for the love that bursts is his chest as they share cold, limp chips. Dan’s just licking the salt off his fingers when the nurse comes in and gives them both a reproachful look.

Phil takes Dan back to his flat a few hours later. The doctor says recovery is basically just a day or two of taking it easy and keeping the incision clean and dry, but Dan spends the next week curled up on Phil’s sofa being waited on hand and foot at Phil’s insistence. Phil has to go out and buy boxes and boxes of biscuits to help Dan get all his pills down. 

Phil’s always been a patient and gentle partner, always there to help Dan when he needs it, but this week changes things. Dan can feel it happening with every day that passes. He can feel himself falling even deeper, feel things slotting into place, at least in his own mind.

It feels right in a way he always assumed it would but didn’t actually have much proof of yet. They don’t live together yet, not really, but this week it feels like they do. He watches Phil putter around in the kitchen in the morning making coffee, watches him brush his teeth and get undressed for bed at night and it feels exactly like what Dan’s been craving. It feels like home.

*

Dan tries to stay on top of his coursework, he really does. He wants the uni experience. He wants to succeed. He wants his parents to be proud of him. He wants to prove he can do it, to himself as much as to everyone else.

He tries to roll out of bed in time for his classes. He tries not to fall asleep in his seminars. He tries not to leave all his revising for the night before every test. 

He tries to spend at least a few nights a week in halls, though always he wants to be curled up tight next to Phil in a bed that doesn’t smell like stale cigarettes. No matter how many times he washes his sheets, they still smell like someone else. 

Phil’s don’t. Phil’s smell like Dan and they smell like Phil. They’re soft and colourful and warm and much of the time too inviting for Dan to resist. 

*

Phil’s phone is making a truly horrendous noise, blaring loudly into the darkness of his bedroom.  
Dan groans, rolling over and tunneling down into the warmth of the duvet and Phil’s body.

“The fuck is that for?” he mutters.

Phil doesn’t even stir. He could sleep through anything.

“Phil.” 

Nothing.

Dan groans some more, forcing himself to sit up and reach across Phil’s worryingly unmoving body for the phone. He fumbles around the tabletop until his fingers find it. 

It’s fucking 4am and the alarm is as a loud as a fog horn, and Dan’s finally woken up enough to remember why it’s going off. Remembers but doesn’t particularly care. It’s too bloody early to be awake. He turns it off and for some reason, it’s only then that Phil finally wakes up.

Dan shuffles back down and wraps his arms around Phil’s waist. “I’m going back to sleep.”

“You’re not.” Phil’s words are barely discernible around the deep rumble of his sleepy voice. “You’ve got a paper to write.”

Dan’s face fits perfectly into the space between Phil’s neck and shoulder, and he presses his lips to that warm smooth skin. “Don’t wanna.”

“I’ll get up with you.”

It’s too much sometimes, Phil’s selflessness, his unwavering love and support and giving of whatever he has to offer. 

“You don’t have to.” Dan says the words because it’d be selfish not to, but he thinks they both know it doesn’t matter. Phil is going to get up with him and make them both coffee and sit on the sofa next to Dan while he writes his stupid paper. He’ll probably even proofread it for him when he’s done.

“I want to.”

Dan breathes a little heavier and slips his hand down the front of Phil’s boxers. “I want you first.” He can’t help it. Kindness turns him on.

“Make it quick, Howell,” Phil says, though he’s already growing hard in Dan’s hand. 

He does. It’s always quick in the morning. They touch each other at the same time and bring each other off quickly. Dan would kill to fall back to sleep and just stay in bed all day and pretend he didn’t have a paper to write for his criminal law class. 

It’s the most interesting of all his classes and he knows he has the ability to write a semi decent essay, but he just… doesn’t care. He just really doesn’t care enough for it not to be soul crushingly difficult. 

He’s right in the end, about everything. Phil gets up with him and makes coffee and sits next to Dan on the sofa and edits his latest video. Their knees stay touching until Phil gets up to order them some food. When Dan’s finally done the bloody paper, Phil edits that for him too. 

*

Christmas is good and bad. Dan had somehow managed to pass all his exams, with Phil’s help of course. He probably wouldn’t have done any revising at all if it hadn’t been for those 4am wake up calls and coffee breaks and tension-releasing shoulder massages from Phil. 

They splash out on a six foot artificial Christmas tree with a load of tinsel and strings and strings of colourful rave lights. They film videos late into the night and bask in the glow of this uninterrupted time they have together. It’s not their first Christmas as a couple, but it’s so different from last year that it might as well be. 

He stays with Phil as long as he can, until Phil leaves for Rawtenstall and Dan is forced to go down to Wokingham.

He likes Christmas. He likes seeing his grandma and eating lots of food and having lie ins and not having to go to school.

He hates having to field questions about how his first year at uni is going, and even worse, what his plans are for when school is over. They don’t ask about YouTube and they only ask about Phil in passing, as if he were nothing more than an afterthought. 

They don’t know Dan, and maybe it’s his own fault. It probably is, he thinks. They don’t know him because he doesn’t tell them anything. But he’s never been the type to share himself with them, and now seems a bad time to start, as he’s never been more unsure of anything in his whole life.

He spends the least amount of time with them that he can possible get away with and the rest in his old bedroom texting Phil. Later at night, when everyone else is asleep, they skype.

Phil’s face on his computer screen never fails to set Dan’s heart aflutter, even more than a year on from the first time. It brings him right back to those nights they’d spend hours and hours just talking and laughing and getting to know each other. Sometimes they’d do other things too, cheeky things -- naughty even -- but not tonight. 

Tonight Dan’s feeling sad and lonely. All he really wants is to see Phil’s face and hear his voice and remember that though so many aspects of his future are terrifyingly uncertain, there is one thing that remains constant. 

There is one thing he’s sure of, and that’s Phil.

Still, his parents’ questions linger in the back of his mind, gnawing away, sinking him deeper and deeper into some kind of existential crisis. 

Phil’s been chatting away happily for the better part of an hour while Dan tries to listen without looking too morose. Phil is happy. He likes his family and he likes visiting them. And he’s already gone through all this university stuff. He’d gone through it and come out the other side with multiple degrees. He doesn’t have existential crises. 

Phil asks Dan what’s wrong eventually. “It’s Christmas,” he says gently. “I can’t have you looking like that at Christmas.”

“I just… I miss you.”

“I miss you too. It won’t be too long, though, yeah? Just another week or something and we’ll be back in Manchester.”

“Yeah.” Dan’s voice lacks any type of conviction whatsoever and he knows Phil will have heard that. 

“What else is it?” Phil asks.

“Just, you know… family shit.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. They just don’t-- they don’t understand me.” Even he can tell that he sounds every bit the teenager he technically still is. 

“You could try talking to them about it.”

Dan just shrugs. “It’s just how it is, innit?”

“Doesn’t have to be.” Phil brushes that long shaggy fringe out of his eyes. He looks sleepy, maybe like he’d rather not be dealing with a conversation like this right now. Or maybe that’s just Dan projecting again, who knows. 

“My family’s not like yours, Phil.”

“I know, I just--”

“When you were in uni, did you like… know? What you wanted to do after, I mean?” Dan wonders why they haven’t ever really talked about this before. “Like did your parents ever ask you about it?”

“Yeah, they did. And I never really had an answer. I kind of knew I was interested in film or whatever. I kind of assumed I’d do something like that.”

“And do they still ask?”

“Yeah. They do.”

“And what do you say?”

“I guess I say YouTube, now.”

Dan nods. “Yeah.” He’s quiet for a long while, staring down at his hands before he says, “I wish I could say that too.”

“Is that what you want?”

Dan shrugs. “I don’t know what I want. That’s always my bloody problem, jesus christ.”

“You don’t want to keep making videos?” 

“Of course I do. I just don’t… I dunno. Is that even like, sustainable? As a career, or whatever the fuck? God, it stresses me out even just thinking about that. Like… do I really want to be a fucking lawyer, Phil? What was I thinking? What am I even doing with my life?” He turns his face away from the computer and bites his lip. He’s really making an ass of himself and he knows it. 

“You don’t really have to think about it now, though,” Phil says gently, always so gently. “That’s what being in university is all about. Not having to worry about what you’re doing with your life. That part comes after.”

“But I feel like I’m wasting my life. Like, I feel like I’m wasting the best years of my life doing some boring shit I don’t actually care about.”

“What do you care about?” Phil asks.

It’s a perfectly reasonable question and yet, Dan doesn’t have an answer, not one that’s really helpful right now anyway. “I dunno. Just-- just you, basically. I just wanna be with you and fuck the rest of it.”

“You are with me.” Phil smiles and it’s a warm thing that lights up his face and brightens his eyes. It’s dark in Phil’s room so Dan can’t see Phil’s eyes in the detail he’d like. He can’t see that particular shade of green-tinged blue but still he feels like he can see into their depths, like he’s swimming and maybe just a little bit in danger of full on drowning in this moment. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. He’s with Phil -- of course he is. He knows that. He doesn’t really doubt that Phil wants to be with him, not really. It’s only on the really bad days in the really bad moments that his brain manages to convince him that he’s not worthy of the love and devotion Phil shows him. 

Dan’s not feeling particularly joyful right now, but he’s not having one of those days. When Phil looks into his eyes and says, “I love you, Dan,” Dan believes it. And it can be enough for now. 

*

Dan’s made a lot of progress since that first week of school. At least in terms of getting to know his housemates. Not only does he get to know them all, but he actually goes so far as to befriend them as well. He goes with them to parties and clubs and stays up late with them regularly, drinking and laughing and missing Phil. No matter what he’s doing or how much fun he has doing it, missing Phil when they’re not together is always a constant in Dan’s life. 

That’s what he’s doing now, as he climbs the steep narrow stairs to the annex in the Anne Frank House. Even when he should definitely be feeling other things, he’s missing Phil.

It doesn’t help that he’s in another country on Phil’s birthday. His housemates had invited him to come to Amsterdam without much notice and he couldn’t exactly say no. It’s hard to say you want to stay home for your boyfriend’s birthday when no one actually knows you have a boyfriend. 

Phil tells him it’s fine, he’s going to go home and spend the day with his parents and Dan should enjoy himself. He gives himself away pretty quickly by texting Dan approximately once every half hour from the moment they say goodbye to each other, but Dan’s glad for it. He’s always relieved when Phil shows him they’re both equally crazy, and equally crazy about each other.

It’s a fun trip. It’s a beautiful city, with more things to see and do than they have time for and the few days they’re there are packed with activity. Dan’s glad he went, he really is. It’s nice to spend time with these people his own age, to go out and have an adventure and be a little bit silly and a little bit careless in a place he’s never been. It’s a nice break from the monotony of lectures and seminars and endless bloody papers.

But it does hurt a little, when he closes his eyes and lays his head down on a pillow that’s not Phil’s on the night of January 30th. He can’t even call him because he’s sharing a room with like four other people. He doesn’t even technically have the bed to himself. 

So he types out a quick message with big fingers clumsy from the night’s intoxications. _happy birthday i love you so much i’ll see you tomorrow_

Phil doesn’t answer. It’s late and he’s probably already asleep. Or maybe he’s just busy enjoying time with his family. Either way, Dan falls asleep with a tiny Phil-shaped hole in his heart.

When he wakes up, he has a message from Phil, one that was sent at 3:27am. He smiles before he even opens it. It’s truly ridiculous how much better it makes him feel.

_omg ahhhhh i’m so sorry i fell asleep with my phone in my hand before i could text you back bby!!! i got kinda drunk oops mum is a bad influence on me. i love you so so so much and i miss you and wish you were here with me but i’m so excited to see you tonight. don’t go back to halls ok come to the flat. mum said i have to stay here for the day but i’ll be back tonight and i don’t wanna sleep alone and i miss you and your body and your face ok? ps i think i might still be a little drunk anyway i’m going back to sleep now love you_

Dan grins down at his phone, so endeared he wishes there was no one else in the room so he could release the giddy squeal that’s built up in his chest. Phil had definitely still been drunk when he wrote this text, and yet he’d said everything Dan could have ever wanted to hear.

The whole message is a beautiful disaster that Dan fully intends on saving forever, but there’s one part of it he can’t stop staring at.

 _don’t go back to halls ok come to the flat._

The flat. Not _my_ flat. _The_ flat.

*

Less than two weeks later there is another birthday to celebrate -- Dan’s mum’s. She calls him up a few days beforehand and asks if he wants to come down to celebrate with the family and he doesn’t know how to say he’d rather not. He’s never been good at prioritizing his own wishes, especially when it means disappointing someone else. So instead of saying no he says yes, and he also says he’ll be bringing Phil with him.

She doesn’t sound at all surprised. She tells him of course, Phil is always welcome. 

Dan thinks his parents must surely know. They don’t offer Phil the sofa in the lounge or even a blow up mattress in Dan’s room anymore. It seems assumed and accepted that Phil will be sleeping in Dan’s bed, despite the fact that it’s a single and definitely too small for two six-foot tall men who might care if their bodies are overlapped in unconsciousness. 

With Phil by his side, it’s a fun day, much more fun than it would’ve been if he’d come down alone. They spend a quiet day with Dan’s family, and at the end of it they go out for a meal. 

When they’ve finished, it’s Phil who insists on dessert. He says it isn’t a birthday without sweets of some kind, so they find a bakery that’s still open at half ten and everyone gets a slightly stale cupcake. They go back to the house and watch a film. Dan’s dad falls asleep on the couch and his brother is on his phone the whole time, but still, it’s nice. His mum looks happy.

He does still have a nagging in the back of his mind though, one that’s been steadily worsening ever since he started school in September. One that he can’t deny gets worse every time he comes back here and has to answer questions about school and work and future plans. 

No one asks him about YouTube, not even once.

He and Phil brush their teeth side by side and Dan tries to cling to the good things that happened today, to all the things he has in his life that he’s grateful for. He hates that he’s like this, that his mind always latches onto the things he’d rather not think about.

He’s half naked in a tiny bed next to the man of his dreams -- a tall, dark (haired, anyway) and handsome man who loves him more than anything in the world, and he can’t stop himself thinking that it’s not quite enough. It feels like the weight of not knowing what comes next is starting to crush him.

“What am I gonna do next year, Phil?” Dan asks quietly into the soft darkness of his bedroom, as if he wasn’t springing this on Phil with no context and no warning. “What are we gonna do?”

“What d’you mean?” Phil’s fingertips are cold where they’re pressing into the fleshy skin of Dan’s waist. Dan hates those fleshy bits but Phil says he loves them, just like he loves every other part of Dan.

How Dan wishes he could just shut the fuck up and give in to how good it feels to have Phil’s hands on him like this. He sighs. “Like… I can’t live in halls once the summer comes. And I really don’t want to spend the summer in Wokingham. I really don’t.”

“Are you not gonna live with me?”

Dan’s heart stutters a bit even just at the thought of it, and at the way Phil throws those words out so casually. “Well, yeah, if you still want to.”

“Don’t be stupid. I thought that was the plan. I didn’t think we even needed to talk about that if I’m honest. ”

“But like… there’s only one bedroom.”

In the dim moonlight that filters in through the window Dan can see Phil furrow his brow in confusion. “Do you want your own bedroom?” He snuggles in a little closer, slipping the tips of his fingers down beneath the band of Dan’s pants to cup his ass. “You don’t like sleeping with me anymore?”

Dan rolls his eyes. He doesn’t even bother dignifying that question with an answer. “Everyone knows there’s only one bedroom. Because of the house tour video...”

Understanding dawns on Phil’s face. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I guess that’s not… what we want? Right?”

Dan shakes his head. He hates himself for it a little bit, but he’s nowhere near ready for something like that. According to their viewers, they’re mates and nothing more. Best mates, yes, but mates. Mates don’t share beds.

“We’ll get a new place then,” Phil says confidently. “A place of our own. A place with two bedrooms. We’ll choose it together and everything.”

Dan can’t contain the smile that breaks out across his face. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, course, you nutter.” Phil gives Dan’s ass a playful squeeze.

“I don’t have any money, though.”

“You have a little bit.”

Dan chuckles darkly. “Yeah, like, a very little bit.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll make it work.”

Dan knows exactly what that means. “It feels weird to get so much help from your parents.”

“Well I say we enjoy it while we can, just like you should enjoy not worrying about this kind of stuff while you can. You have literally your entire life to worry about that.”

Dan nods. He doesn’t bother telling Phil that not worrying definitely isn’t an option. He doesn’t tell Phil that _what am I going to do next year_ is actually a much bigger question for him than where he’s going to live. He can push it aside for now and let the joy at the prospect of living with Phil wash over him. It’s the one thing he knows for sure he wants, and it looks like he’s really going to get it.

*

Dan has a flute of champagne in his hand and a buzz in his veins -- and it’s not just because this isn’t his first or even his second drink. He’s tipsy, but it’s more than that. 

He’s stood in a corner of the room, watching Phil from afar. He’s having a good time, more than he even expected to, but he’d needed a little break from smiling and schmoozing. 

Phil probably wants a break too, but he’s busy talking to some Google exec right now, gesturing animatedly as he recounts some story or another -- or maybe he’s actually pitching something, Dan’s not really sure. It’s fun to watch though. Phil’s got a flute in his hand too, and every time he waves it around in the air to punctuate a sentence the bubbly golden liquid threatens to spill out over the rim of the glass.

Phil’s never been that great at handling his liquor. Dan will make fun of him for it later, but right now he’s quite enjoying the show.

He’s enjoying everything about tonight, actually. He’s enjoying the glamour of it all and the idea that he’s important enough to have been invited to something like this. Maybe he wouldn’t have been invited if it wasn’t for Phil, but that’s ok. He’ll take what he can get at this point. Any excuse to get cleaned up and forget about the soul crushing monotony of uni for a few hours is a good excuse.

Plus, this way he gets to stare at Phil in a suit, which -- not bad. 

He’s wearing a suit of his own and can’t deny it makes him feel fancy. It’s such a foreign feeling, especially of late. Most days he can’t even be arsed to shower because really, what’s the point? He’s just going to go to class and see the same old people, most of whom are just as bored and glassy-eyed as him. 

Or maybe they’re not and he’s just telling himself they are because it helps him feel a little less guilty for being such a giant bloody disappointment. He takes a long sip of his drink and ends up draining the remaining half of the glass in one go. He can feel it travelling down his throat and warming him all the way. He barely even tastes the bite of the alcohol anymore.

Phil finds him in the corner a few minutes later and bumps his hip into Dan’s. It’s decidedly more contact than they usually allow themselves in so public a space, but they’re both a little drunk and a lot happy and Dan can’t find it in himself to care too much right now. 

“I’m hungry,” Phil whines.

Dan smiles, fondness radiating from every corner of his body. “Me too. Why do YouTubers never eat? I don’t understand it.”

Phil tilts his head and rests the side of it on Dan’s shoulder. He must be even drunker than Dan thought, but he’s still not going to tell him to stop. Phil makes a low humming noise in his throat and it’s the perfect encapsulation of the heady kind of contentment Dan is feeling in this moment too.

“How do I go back after this, Phil?” Dan whispers. 

“Hmm? Back where?”

“To uni. To halls. All of it. How do I go back when-- there’s this.”

“It’s just two more years, Danny. Two more years, and you can still have this too. You can have both.” His voice is slurred just the slightest bit, deep and smooth like treacle. Dan wishes he could chase the sound with his own lips, but he doesn’t think either of them are drunk enough for that.

“Right,” Dan murmurs. The thought of both, of having to split his time between something he’s really growing to love and something he’s growing to accept he well and truly hates swirls sourly in his gut. 

He knows how to compromise. He knows how to compartmentalize. He does it every day, every time he has to call Phil a mate instead of what he is, the goddamn love of his life. He has to compromise every day, and he doesn’t want to do it anymore. 

*

Dan calls Phil pretty much the instant he’s turned the camera off and picked his textbooks up off the floor. The crumbled up crisp bits scattered all over the desk can wait. 

“Hello?”

“I’m going mad,” Dan says in lieu of a greeting. 

Phil chuckles. “Ok… Is that supposed to be news to me?”

“Shut up, I’m serious.”

“What happened? Just too much writing?”

He’s meant to have been writing a very large, very important paper today. 

“Uh…”

Dan swears he can _hear_ Phil’s frown from across the city. “You haven’t been writing, have you? Have you been sleeping all day?”

“What? No, of course not, I’ve been working really hard, actually.” It’s not technically a lie. 

“On what?”

“Um. A video?”

“Dan. Are you serious? You told me it’s due tomorrow and worth a huge chunk of your grade.”

“It is.” By now Dan’s gnawing on his thumbnail with purpose. “I also told you I’m going mad.”

“Have you even started it yet?”

He doesn’t answer, which he figures is an answer in itself. 

“Dan,” is all Phil can muster, just a quiet mutter of his idiot boyfriend’s name, a soft verbal expression of his disappointment.

“Can I come over?” Dan asks weakly. 

“Of course. But you have to work on your paper.”

Dan doesn’t argue. It’s not like he actually wants to fail out of school and he knows Phil won’t let him either, not without doing everything in his power to help. He’d probably write the bloody paper himself if Dan asked him to.

He won’t, but it’s definitely tempting. He shoves his books, his camera and his laptop into his backpack and goes outside to wait for his taxi. 

When he gets there they assume their all too familiar positions — Dan on the sofa with a frown on his face and his laptop on his thighs, Phil in the kitchen making an extra strong cup of coffee to help Dan power through what is guaranteed to be an all nighter. The sun is already setting and he’s just starting the damn research. 

Phil sits next to him and browses quietly on his own computer, and it makes the whole thing just a little less unbearable for Dan. 

A few hours in, Dan sets his work aside and stretches his arms up over his head. Phil turns to look at him with a questioning expression. He’s wearing his glasses and his his hair is messy, flattened in the middle and on the sides by his headphones. He looks sleepy and adorable and Dan has none too insignificant a pang of regret. It’s one thing to be this shit a student, but he doesn’t like the idea that he may be a shit boyfriend as well.

Phil slides his headphones down ‘round his neck. “What’s up?”

“Need a break. This shit is boring as fuck.”

“How’s it coming?” Phil asks.

Dan shrugs. He’s trying to care but it gets harder and harder with every passing day. He’s honestly not sure how he’s going to make it through another two years of this.

He picks Phil’s macbook up off his legs and sets that aside too, before turning around and lying down, resting his head in Phil’s lap. “I’m tired.”

Phil’s hand is in Dan’s hair, combing through it and stroking gently along his scalp. “Yeah,” is all he says in response. 

Dan stares off into the distance, eyes fixed on the dent they’d made in the wall when carrying in the dining room table. “What am I gonna do?” 

“You’re gonna take a little break and then get back to it.” Phil sweeps Dan’s fringe up and off his forehead before laying his palm flat against it. 

Dan tilts his head back and looks up at Phil. “Am I?”

Phil rubs his thumb over Dan’s eyebrow absentmindedly. “What are you asking me?”

Dan closes his eyes. He sighs deeply and tries to focus on how good it feels to have Phil touching him like this, so intimate and yet so innocent. “Nothing, I guess. I just hate it.”

“Yeah, I know. Everyone hates this part of school. The actual work part. You’ll get through it, though.”

“But what if… what if I don’t want to?”

It’s Phil’s turn to sigh. Not in exasperation, Dan doesn’t think, maybe just to show Dan he understands the gravity of the conversation and that he wants to take his time formulating his response. 

“What do you want?” he asks gently. “Do you not want go to school anymore?”

“I just… don’t see the point. How am I gonna keep doing this if I hate it so much?”

“Maybe you just need to keep going. Maybe you’re just not adjusted yet.”

“It’s been like seven months, Phil. Did it take you this long to adjust?”

Phil answers by changing the subject with a question of his own. “What would you do if you weren’t doing this? Like, if you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?”

All Dan can think about is how he chose to spend his day today, filming pom bears on strings and making ridiculous voices and making a right mess of him room. All he can think is how utterly stupid it was and how much bloody fun he’d had doing it.

“What would _you_ do?” Dan asks. 

“What I’m doing right now.” He says it softly, like he’s afraid of how Dan might react. 

Dan hates that. He hates that he’s so sensitive and volatile all the time that Phil might be afraid to be honest. “What, play with my hair you mean?”

Phil smiles. “Yeah, or YouTube. You know, whatever, just the thing I turned down an internship at a film studio for. No big deal.” 

“You’re telling me you’re already like, living your dream?”

Phil’s smile widens. “Of course. I get to be with you, after all.”

Dan rolls his eyes to try to deflect from his own giant smile. “Oh fuck off.”

“Sorry mate, I live here. Nowhere else to go.” He leans down and kisses Dan’s forehead.

Dan tilts his head back again and catches Phil’s lips. He feels better, even if nothing is really any clearer than it was before. If Phil thinks he can do this, then it must be true. 

*

By the time exams start, Dan’s relatively sure there’s no hope for him. Despite his repeated promises to Phil that he’d try harder, he gets through each lecture and assignment with the bare minimum amount of effort -- and sometimes no effort at all. He barely ever sleeps in halls anymore and when he does he usually can’t be arsed to drag himself out of bed before midday, which means he misses more classes than he attends. 

He spends the vast majority of his time playing halo, drinking with his housemates, filming videos and spending time with Phil. 

Mostly spending time with Phil. They game together a lot, and film videos together a lot, and Dan is usually able to drown out the voices telling him he’s wasting his life. Being young and in love works pretty well at keeping the spiraling vortex of crippling nihilism and unfulfilled dreams at bay. 

Phil does his best to help, as he always does, but Dan, each time without fail, leaves all his revising to the night before each exam. Afterwards, all things considered, he thinks things actually could’ve gone worse. He can’t be sure, but he feels like he might have actually done well enough to scrape by.

Turns out he did -- almost. He’s passed all his exams apart from one. After he gets the news he spends an entire day in bed. In Phil’s bed. Crying. He shouldn’t be surprised. He’s lucky it’d only been one exam he’d failed.

Phil is there the whole time, lying next to him and holding him and telling him it’s fine, he can resit the exam in August. He has the whole summer to revise and Phil promises to help. For some reason that makes Dan feel a little bit worse.

He gets over it, though. If he’s honest with himself what he does is force himself to forget, because he still has the sinking feeling that to study law is essentially to give up on all of his dreams and condemn himself to a deeply uninteresting life. He’s still unsure of what those dreams actually are, but he’s fairly certain at this point that they don’t involve being sat in an office all day, wearing a suit and shuffling papers around. Even just the thought makes his gut clench. 

*

They move into their new place in July and Dan’s never been happier. This isn’t Phil’s flat to which Dan has the key. This isn’t an apartment Dan spends the night in when he can’t bear the thought of sleeping on his own. This is their place. Their home. They’d picked it out together and Dan doesn’t ever have to pretend to be Phil’s houseguest ever again. He doesn’t have to leave every few days to ensure no one gets the wrong idea.

As discussed, they each have their own room, but it’s almost entirely for show. Dan likes having his own space sometimes, and he likes having a room he can decorate the way he wants, but they both consider Phil’s bed to be their bed. 

They stay up late together most nights. Every once in a while Phil will tap out earlier than Dan, but always when he’s ready for sleep Dan will crawl in next to Phil. He doesn’t really know how to sleep by himself anymore. Phil’s arms around him help quiet the incessant nagging of the voices. Phil’s chest pressed tight to his back is exactly the stability he needs.

He doesn’t revise, not even once. He feels the tug in the back of his head every single day, knowing he should, knowing his exam waits at the end of the summer, knowing that whether or not he passes it will determine the course of his future, and still every day he chooses not to revise. 

Maybe that means something. Maybe that means he’d already made his choice a long time ago, but, when it comes to the night before the test, he still hasn’t admitted that to himself. He gathers up all his textbooks and brushes the dust off them, determined to cram as much of their knowledge into his brain as it can possibly hold. He’s only a few pages in when the unbearable weight of how impossible this is crushes out any delusion he’d had that this was in any way doable. 

A whole year’s worth of terrible feelings are unleashed all at once and he starts crying. Not a few quiet tears but heaving sobs and stuttered breaths, panic radiating in every cell.

Phil is there in an instant, looking absolutely terrified. He doesn’t ask Dan what’s wrong, he just sits next to him and pulls him in to his chest. He squeezes his arms ‘round Dan’s shoulders. He squeezes tight, and in this moment it’s not a gesture of affection or even comfort, but one of grounding, of depressing the nerves that wrack, of holding Dan together when he feels like he has no choice but to fall apart.

“Breathe,” Phil says. “Dan, breathe.”

Eventually he does. Eventually he can, without feeling like his throat is closing up. It takes a long time, but Phil doesn’t move. He doesn’t release his grip on Dan’s shoulders for near an hour, until Dan’s breathing has returned to normal, and even then he stays close. He puts his hand on Dan’s thigh and this time it _is_ a gesture of comfort and affection. 

“I can’t do it, Phil. I can’t.”

“Ok,” Phil says gently. As if he would possibly risk arguing at this moment. 

“I can’t do it. I don’t care about this shit. I can’t waste any more time with this. It’s all a lie. It’s not me.”

“Ok, Dan. It’s ok.”

Dan bites his lip, pulling at the already thin, chapped skin with his teeth. He feels shaky and weak, like his whole body is just one raw, exposed nerve and the slightest poke would be too much. “What am I gonna do, though?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Phil says. 

It’s simple and it doesn’t really answer Dan’s question at all, but it makes him feel better. He can’t expect Phil to have a real answer. The knowledge that Phil will support him no matter what is the only answer he needs tonight. 

He picks up his books and puts them in his room, in the back of his wardrobe where he can’t see them. They put on their shoes and go outside and Phil takes him to the first shop they come across that sells chocolate. 

They sit on the edge of the fountain outside their building and eat sweets in the dark. They try to look up at the stars but it’s too cloudy. The sky is just black and empty. It makes Dan laugh. In a way it’s perfect. It comforts him, actually. He can’t see the stars but he knows they’re there. 

He doesn’t know what the future holds, exactly. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with his life. It’s nebulous, just like this hazy black August sky, but Phil is there and he always will be and for now it’s enough. The rest can wait.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi @waveydnp on tumblr :)


End file.
